The invention relates to a method for controlling driving means which are designed to steer and move a robot vehicle on a working area as well as to a robot vehicle, in particular a lawn mowing vehicle.
Autonomous lawn mowers currently available on the market navigate by means of random navigation. This is fraught with several disadvantages. There is thus no guarantee for a complete coverage of the working area. Numerous traverses by the mower leave the lawn having an unaesthetic appearance. An advantageous global positioning of the robot vehicle having an accuracy with a margin of error less than 5 cm could allow for an optimal travel strategy. Such an accurate positioning nowadays represents, however, a technical barrier. Standard GPS receivers are thus considerably less accurate, and other technologies are too cost intensive and too susceptible to breakdown or require a complex installation, such as for instance the use of known landmarks from the British patent GB 2 277 152 A1.
Controlling autonomous robot vehicles by dead reckoning, i.e. on the basis of odometry data, is also known. It is, however, in this case disadvantageous that the position estimation error, which occurs transversely to the direction of travel of the robot vehicle, grows without bounds as the path length increases so that traversing the entire working area solely on the basis of dead reckoning is equivalent to random navigation.
The aim underlying the invention is to propose a control method for autonomous robot vehicles, in particular for lawn mowing vehicles, which on the one hand can be cost effectively implemented and nevertheless minimizes multiple traverses in comparison to a purely random navigation. As a result of using this optimized control method, in some embodiments, a more beautifully manicured lawn shall result when the robot vehicle is configured as a lawn mowing vehicle. Furthermore, the aim is to propose a correspondingly optimized robot vehicle, in particular a lawn mowing vehicle.